How Can Social Media Help Your Business?

It’s a little known fact of the small business world: people buy from people, not from websites. Interesting concept, right? You could have the nicest website in the world with the most interesting design, content and feel. It could have valuable information, a great call to action, and an updated blog. All of those things matter tremendously, but people won’t buy from your website. They’ll buy from you.

So what does that mean, exactly? How do people buy from you if they have to physically go to a website to check everything out and to actually purchase an item? It means that you need to develop and maintain your brand’s personality, and one of the biggest and fastest ways to do that is to take to social media. Barack Obama can use Twitter, and you can too.

Social Media Can Help If You Put the Work In

No one likes extra work on their plate, but no one likes their business failing, either. Although social media requires a non-trivial amount of extra work, it’s worth it when you get right down to it. One of the most important ways to put work into social media is by building your audience. This doesn’t just mean building your numbers, although that’s important, too. It’s all about building an audience that actually has an interest in your product or service. While just gathering followers in the first place often results in in some activity among the people who like, follow, or read your social media pages, the higher activity rates happen when you make sure that the majority of the people who follow you are people who are legitimately interested in your company. This can take longer than just going out and finding likes, but it’s worth it in the long run.

The easiest way to do this is to figure out who your audience is and set clear marketing goals on all the social media channels you use and expect to build audiences on, such as G+, Twitter and Facebook.

Social Media Can Connect You to New Clients and Other Helpful People

While social media is great because you can use it to sell to new clients and build a new fan base of people who like your company and talk about it, you may also wind up meeting new connections and new friends with whom you can network. Sometimes, people will simply drop you a message if they want to team up and do business with you. Sometimes this includes a partnership, and sometimes it just means inviting you to an event that’s happening locally. If you weren’t on social media in the first place, you’d never get these opportunities.

And Finally, Social Media Helps You Find Your Voice – and Your “Feel”

When you start writing for social media, one of the most important things is that you define yourself and your voice off the bat. This voice should be consistent across all of your channels so that people always know what they’re going to get, even if they are interacting with you on G+ today instead of LinkedIn. This “voice” will help you develop your company personality, which means that more people will start to relate to you. Relating is good – people who relate to a brand are 67% more likely to buy from it, studies show.

Overall, social media can do a lot of things for you by helping you build an audience, find new connections, and define what your business persona is. All of this means more money in your pocket in the long run, so social media involvement – even when it’s hard work – is worth it.